Climate Resilience

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN DISASTERS AND DEVELOPMENT

The baseline for resilience in the face of climate change
is good development and sound resource management. The
first stop on a continuum of action is to prepare for and
reduce the impacts of weather-related disasters. While these
are universally recognized entry points the dialectic between
climate resilience as good development and climate protection
from extreme weather events reveals much about the state of
play in climate resilience. Three stories from Syria set the scene
for a conversation between Tom Downing and Mo Hamza,
chaired by Emily Boyd and including active engagement with
the audience. The conversation begins with Tom noting the
uncomfortable location of climate resilience as the interspace
between the many big data of climate-impacts science and
the complexity and shifting sands of decision-making. We will
conclude the conversation with three things we must know
and act on. An emergent property of the conversation with
the participants.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER My approach to climate resilience? What works

Thomas E Downing emerges from practice and practice requires
My professional career began as the first (acting) director of the Natural learning. Protocols and platforms require people
Hazards Information Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Guided who embody evidence in effective practice.
by my first mentor, Gilbert F White, I led the team organizing the first of
what continues some 35 years later as the premier national workshop
on natural hazards in the US. With appointment of the first director, I TIME: 13:00–14:00, 16 JANUARY 2018
completed my Masters degree ”A risk assessment of flooding in Boulder, PLACE: PALAESTRA HÖRSAL, PALAESTRA
Colorado”. I returned to Boulder after the flood of record in 2013? And saw ET ODEUM, PARADISGATAN 4
how our early work had matured and resulted in a city that faired relatively
well compared to similar towns in the Front Range of Colorado.
A PhD at Clark University in Geography was based on my work in Kenya
on coping with drought. I spent four years in national government working
on district environmental assessments. The severe drought across Africa of
1984 saw much-improved responses compared to the 1970s catastrophes. My
work informed the first multi-national study of climate change impacts, using
drought as an analogue of future climate impacts. I returned to East Africa
regularly, including a series of studies on the economics of climate adaptation.
Brief spells at the World Hunger Programme at Brown University and the
National Center for Atmospheric Research segued into one of the founders
of the Environmental Change Institute in Oxford and then the Oxford Office
of the Stockholm Environment Institute. This experience in the start-up
Image Source: Onypix/Shutterstock.com

teams for four major multi-disciplinary units was helpful but not sufficient
in setting up the Global Climate Adaptation Partnership. GCAP is unique in
linking consulting practice to learning (through our Adaptation Academy)
and technology (online tools including the Climate Safeguard System for the
African Development Bank).